Google Chrome, or Chrome, is a web browser software that tries to compete with major players, such as Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and even the Opera web browser. It is available for the Linux, Android, iOS, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X operating systems. But Google Chrome is more than a web browser, as it combines sophisticated open source technology, borrowed from the Chromium application, into a minimal design, all in order to help users surf the web much faster, a lot easier, and safer than ever before.

Features at a glance

A unique functionality of the Google Chrome application is its ability to search the web directly from the address bar. Just type one or more words in the address bar and immediately get suggestions for popular web pages. The application displays thumbnails of your top websites on the new tab page, a function that is popularly called Speed Dial. This functionality is also available on other similar products, and it allows you to easily access your favorite web pages instantly, with lightning speed, from any new tab.

Comes with Private browsing mode

Private browsing is also a strong point of the Google Chrome web browser, enabling users to surf the Internet in an incognito window, when they don't want to save their browsing history, or if they’re hiding from NSA (National Security Agency). Just like Mozilla Firefox, the Chrome web browser includes a handy cloud service, which allows you to safely and securely sync all of your passwords, browsing history, bookmarks, apps, extensions, autofill, themes, and opened tabs across multiple devices.

Will never replace Mozilla Firefox

Because we heard such good things about it, we’ve tried a little experiment with the Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox products. We wanted to replace the powerful Mozilla Firefox web browser that we use on many computers here at Softpedia, with Google Chrome. Surprisingly, the Chrome browser proved to be a poor product for our needs, especially because it misses some important extensions that are currently available only on the Mozilla Firefox application, such as Clippings, Copy Plain Text, or InFormEnter.

You should try Mozilla Firefox

These days, you can’t avoid Google’s web services. Whether you sign up for Gmail and Google+, or you just want to use its quite powerful office tools (yes, this short review is written in Google Documents), you may find you end up asking yourself, "Why not use Chrome?". The answer is simple, use Chrome if you just want to use Google’s powerful services and nothing more. But if you want a serious web browser, you should try Mozilla Firefox.

Google Chrome was reviewed by Marius Nestor, last updated on February 26th, 2015